When my family filed into Christ Church—all stone inside with mahogany pews—I kept my eyes down. The damp air seemed to have an electric charge. Feeling hundreds of eyes trained on us as we took our seats in the front row, I clung to the piece of paper on which I’d written my reflections on my father’s talent and character—a crystallization of all his best qualities, but an honest one, one that acknowledged his difficult side as well.
As the minister spoke, I thought about my father’s ashes, which would go into a wall with a bronze plaque inside Christ Church’s rose garden, the same wall where Charlie’s ashes had been bricked in five and a half years before. When I visited Charlie’s place in the wall, I left flowers. For my father, I would leave Cuban cigars.
And then it was my turn to speak. I walked over and took my place at the pulpit. The rustle of programs, with my father’s photograph on the front, filled the church. I looked out at the crowd. Charlie and my father were not among them, and never would be again. With difficulty, I began to read the piece I’d written on the plane. I talked about my father’s talent as an artist, and how photography had been one of the only ways he knew to connect with others. I talked of how difficult he could be at times, but also about the sensitive, generous man who’d been hiding beneath that gruff exterior. I talked of his loneliness, and how, like any of us, he’d only wanted to be happy. His heart had been like the shutter of his camera—opening wide for an instant, allowing the warmth of his spirit to escape into the room, however briefly.
My eulogy done, I looked up and spotted Elisa in the fourth row, her cheeks wet with tears. Had she recognized those same admirable qualities in my father? And had he felt this? Many of the people in the church had not reached out to my father in years, not since his marriage to Elisa. People were complicated. We failed ourselves, and each other. But we were all here now.
And so, as Elisa’s eyes met mine, I smiled.
Open a few windows,” suggested Bobby. He, Whitney, and I had driven over to my father’s house to sort through his collections. “Let’s get some air in here.” Bobby’s dark mustache had flecks of gray, and he wore the rope anklet that marked him as an islander. At the funeral, his eulogy had made light of my father’s punitive parenting style, recalling how, when we were kids, my father had jestingly referred to our house as “Stalag Stroh,” after the term used for German prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.
Whitney opened the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace and went out to smoke a cigarette. He was in the midst of a drawn-out divorce and looked tired, his handsome face sagging in the dim winter light. He settled into the chair where just a few months before my father had sat smoking a cigar and balancing Mishka on his knee.
I wandered through my father’s house. Eighteenth-and mid-nineteenth-century English antiques mixed with sumptuously upholstered chairs and wildlife paintings in gilt frames. I had long ago left behind the world of monogrammed sweaters and award-winning gardens that my father’s classic taste evoked, though my own rooms in San Francisco were peppered with English antiques I’d inherited from Stroh relatives over the years. Never feeling I had the money to properly decorate, I’d been glad to take the furniture, though in my fantasy I lived in a house full of Gerhard Richter paintings, Eames chairs, and sleek sectional sofas.
In my father’s library, framed photographs of all of us at various life stages were mixed in with the books. I felt grateful that Charlie wasn’t there to witness the absence of any shots of him as an adult anywhere in the house. Our studied smiles in the images covered over something else—a weight, an implicit knowledge that soon it would all come undone. And yet I felt a good deal lighter now. In all my weeping for my father over the previous days, I’d finally found the way to let Charlie go, too. Grief was perhaps undifferentiated.
I spotted the Dickens set—the one my father had purchased on our trip to New York when I was six. The gold-embossed spines of the volumes shimmered in the sunlight on his bookshelf. An apparition, a memory long locked away in a treasure chest, beheld once more. The house and most of its contents would soon be gone, just as the brewery was. We’d somehow allowed ourselves to be pinned into place by these things; and in our search for freedom, some of us had self-destructed.
I walked into the living room to find Whitney lining up my father’s six most valuable oil paintings, leaning them against the back of the sofa. He’d brought them up from the safe in the basement and had removed their protective, acid-free cloth covers, the same gilt-framed paintings he had considered removing from the house just after my father died for fear their value would create an enormous tax burden to the estate. Later, after receiving the appraisal report from DuMouchelles, we realized his worries had been pointless.
“You choose first,” I said. I had my eye on a rain-drenched Paris street scene by the postwar impressionist Edouard Cortès, my heart suddenly racing as if I were bidding at an auction.